For '3 Wyrd Things' I ask various creative people whose work I admire to tell us about three oddly, wonderfully, weirdly British things that have been an influence on them and their work:
- a book or author,
- a film or TV show,
- a song / album or musician / group.
I read Rebecca's post-apocalyptic novella, 'Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group', in July of 2025 after being intrigued by the synopsis and enticed by the accompanying blurb from Iain Sinclair. I was entirely blown away by the poetic nature of her prose and the ease of her storytelling and it was easily one of the best things I read all year.
In December 2025 she announced her next book, 'The Undead Shepherdess and Further Cavities', a “collaborative collection of woodcarvings paired with odd and mischievous poetry, illuminating a path to antiquity”, written in collaboration with Sean Kilpatrick and available from Pig Roast Publishing,
She is published at X-R-A-Y, Burning House Press, Expat Press, Bruiser, and BULL, among others. A new edition of the novella 'Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group' is released at Tangerine Press.
Rebecca's website can be found here - https://rebeccagransden.wordpress.com/
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Nik Kershaw - Wouldn’t It Be Good
In 1951 Ealing Studios released The Man in the White Suit, starring Alec Guinness. In the film Guinness plays a scientist who discovers the formula for a type of everlasting cloth. The titular white suit is made from this material, lightly glowing with radioactive qualities, and Guinness spends the rest of the film dressed in it as he tries to convince the world that his discovery should be taken on board. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the film is a satirical look at the absurdities of capitalism, and an unusual addition to the ‘one man against the system’ genre.
Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good” was released in 1984, and Mackendrick’s film reveals its connection to the track when it comes to the music video. From the start, the video creates an disquieting atmosphere, with two characters whispering to each other on a nighttime street corner, both attired straight out of an old film noir. Kershaw makes his entrance in his own white suit, his with a distinctly 1980s cut, carrying a leather suitcase. The similarities with Guinness’s character continue, as in his room Kershaw makes use of his own laboratory, albeit on a makeshift scale. Here, the video takes a turn further into the strange, and the suit becomes a very 1980s jumpsuit, with extraordinary qualities, where black and white images are projected over the entirety of its surface. Now, Kershaw becomes an alien visitor, akin to Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, here to observe humanity, for what purpose we don’t know.
The video is one that for a long time I recalled in fragments, with a half remembered main picture of Kershaw in the jumpsuit, defined by the uncanny flatness of the black and white moving image on its surface. In my memory the suit was covered only by white noise static, not the various footage that includes waves, people, and radio telescope dishes that actually appear in the video. For a long time the video existed to me entirely as an impression of Kershaw perpetually running down dingy corridors, trapped in his own version of the hallways in Polanski’s Repulsion.
“Wouldn’t It Be Good” hit media rotation at the height of Cold War tensions, with superpowers engaged in an arms race and nuclear anxiety at its peak. Kershaw’s lyrics reflect a longing for escape and the melancholy tone is accompanied by a sinister aura, suggesting resignation and a feeling of powerlessness. While the song implies a personal meaning, it does take its place as an example of unease at work in the zeitgeist, a quality common to synth pop from this era. The video reinforces this wider application, with the human race under scrutiny from alien eyes, and the overriding atmosphere is that of a reality dominated by mysterious forces with unknown agendas. By the end, Kershaw’s alien is the one under surveillance, with a group of people homing in on him like a scene from a 1950s communist paranoia b-movie.
The final scene has the alien make his escape via radio telescope, apparently beamed away into the cosmos. Shot at Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is situated on the outskirts of Cambridge in the UK, the footage shows Kershaw fading to invisibility as he nears the giant discs, a brilliant white shaft of light emitting from them into the sky. The image of the radio telescope is synonymous with UFO lore, and alongside the much-appreciated pylon, these structures have cemented their place as icons of eerie landscapes.
The video itself was directed by Storm Thorgerson, the much lauded graphic designer and music video director, and his surreal sensibility is a key component. On the surface, the concept is a simple one, but Thorgerson’s vision adds layers that seep into the unconscious. Similarly, the track presents itself as a pop song but is deceptively sophisticated in its structure, and the lyrics curious in their angst.
Knightmare
“Where am I?”
Broadcast on UK television from the late 1980s until mid 1990s, ITV’s Knightmare has since gathered a sizeable cult following. The show appeared as British television’s response to the rise in popularity of role-playing games and early dungeon based video games. Where Knightmare singles itself out is its innovative use of computer graphics and green screen technology.
A team of school age contestants are tasked with beating the challenges of the dungeon, with one player given an oversized helmet to wear which renders them blind. The helmeted contestant is then sent into the dungeon to be guided remotely by the rest of their team, who watch their teammate on a monitor from a medievally ornamented chamber. Overseeing proceedings is the commanding presence of Knightmare’s dungeon master, Treguard, played memorably by Hugo Myatt.
Knightmare’s cast is made up of trained actors with theatre experience, and the performances are as good as anything else in children’s television of the era. For the sake of fairness, due to the show being a legitimate competition, there could be no retakes, so the actors’ expertise is essential, and their familiarity with live performance a great asset.
Of most significance to me is Knightmare’s ability to incorporate multiple mediums yet forge its own identity. As every new team journeys through the dungeon they do so by travelling from area to area, each part providing a fresh challenge or clue. By taking the video game format of using an avatar to navigate a map, Knightmare inserts a player into the place of the avatar, inside a projection that can only be viewed by the teammates. It is this slipperiness of form that I find most interesting, as well as the show’s exploration of video game narrative. For years I assumed Knightmare’s environments were created using computer graphics, but the earliest backgrounds used in the series are hand-drawn by the renowned artist David Rowe, whose work has featured on many iconic video game boxes. The programmes’s visual style has been hugely influential on fantasy gaming, and it is this cross-pollination that remains one of Knightmare’s enduring strengths.
In addition to being highly imaginative Knightmare is also wonderfully morbid. Few teams conquered the dungeon, meaning for most episodes the experience for the viewer is a wait to find out by which method the blind contestant will die horribly. A powerful memory of the show is that of the game’s health meter, a large knight’s face that gradually decays as the player’s life-force diminishes, until stripping layers of flesh away to reveal a deathly skull and elimination from the competition.
Ghost That Haunt You, compiled by Aidan Chambers
Ghosts That Haunt You is an anthology of ghost stories, and features tales that focus on ghosts that haunt young people. First published by Kestrel in 1980, it is Puffin’s later release that found its way into my hands.
Compiled by Aidan Chambers, the collection proved to be my introduction to several authors. Chambers’ own contribution comes last in the anthology and is of a darkly humorous tone, where a man finds himself dead after falling into a cement mixer, with his body being poured into the structure of an insurance building under construction. The setting is that of car parks and lay-bys, and an earlier example of the type of liminal environment that populates the modern imagination. Chambers recounts his own ghost story in the anthology’s foreword, where three figures haunted him over a period of months in his younger years.
While the book includes many chilling stories it is the Puffin edition’s cover image that marks it out as a true treasure of the weird. A disembodied eye graces the cover, staring out in unearthly blue. Surrounding the eye is a geometric pattern, and it is only on closer inspection that this is revealed to be a series of amorphous figures linking hands. The illustration is by Bert Kitchen, who has contributed drawings of animals and the wilderness to many children’s books on nature. Kitchen’s cover illustration has more in common with the side of his work that embraces stranger, more surreal imagery. Many of his artworks feature natural forms bent into uniform patterns, with his paintings creating a still, uncanny quality. Horror covers of the '80s and ‘90s frequently possessed a face staring straight out at the potential reader, and have lingered in the mind of many for this reason. While Kitchen’s blue eye retains that confronting pose, it does so in a more subtle, ethereal manner. An eye out of place is a classic image of disconcertion, used by filmmakers also, most notably to me in Pan’s Labyrinth and The Gate. Ghosts That Haunt You’s eye doesn’t follow you around the room, it waits in a drawer or on a shelf, for a time when you choose to meet its gaze. On the back cover the image is repeated, but now the eye is closed, and the figures changed from ghostly white to shadowy black.
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